NABOKV-L post 0027459, Tue, 15 Aug 2017 11:09:29 +0300

In Canto Four of his poem John Shade (the poet in VN’s novel Pale Fire, 1962) describes shaving and mentions Beirut (a seaport in and the capital of Lebanon) and old Zembla’s fields:

And while the safety blade with scrap and screak
Travels across the country of my cheek,
Cars on the highway pass, and up the steep
Incline big trucks around my jawbone creep,
And now a silent liner docks, and now
Sunglassers tour Beirut, and now I plough
Old Zembla's fields where my gray stubble grows,
And slaves make hay between my mouth and nose. (ll. 931-38)

In his Commentary Kinbote (Shade’s mad commentator who imagines that he is Charles the Beloved, the last self-exiled king of Zembla) writes:

I am a weary and sad commentator today.

Parallel to the left-hand side of this card (his seventy-sixth) the poet has written, on the eve of his death, a line (from Pope's Second Epistle of the Essay on Man) that he may have intended to cite in a footnote:

At Greenland, Zembla, or the Lord knows where

So this is all treacherous old Shade could say about Zembla--my Zembla? While shaving his stubble off? Strange, strange... (note to Line 937)

Unlike Shade, Kinbote does not shave his beard. Gimn borode (“A Hymn to the Beard,” 1757) is a poem by Lomonosov. At the beginning of his poem Pokhvala komaru (“In Praise of the Mosquito,” 1807) Derzhavin mentions Pope (spelling the name as a two-syllable word, Pópe), the author of The Rape of the Lock (1717) who glorified the lock of a woman’s hair, and Lomonosov, the author of “A Hymn to the Beard” who praised chest’ usov (the dignity of mustache):

The characters created by Shakespeare are not, as in Molière, basically types of such and such a passion, such and such a vice, but living beings filled with many passions, many vices. Circumstances develop their varied and many-sided personalities before the viewer. In Molière, the Miser is miserly – and that’s all; in Shakespeare, Shylock is miserly, acute, vindictive, philoprogenitive, and witty. In Molière, the hypocrite dangles after the wife of his benefactor — hypocritically; he takes the estate into his care — hypocritically; and asks for a glass of water — hypocritically. In Shakespeare, the hypocrite passes sentence with vainglorious severity — but justly. He justifies his cruelty with the profound judgment of a statesman. He seduces innocence with powerful, convincing sophisms — not with a ridiculous mixture of piety and rakery. Angelo is a hypocrite because his public acts contradict his hidden passions. And what profundity there is in this character!

But perhaps nowhere is the many-sided genius of Shakespeare reflected with such variety as in Falstaff, whose vices, one connected to another, form an amusing ugly chain, like an ancient Bacchanalia. Analyzing Falstaff’s character, we see that its main feature is voluptuousness; probably from youth, coarse, cheap woman chasing was his first interest, but he is already past fifty. He’s gotten fat and grown decrepit. Gluttony and wine have noticeably won out over Venus. Secondly, he is a coward, but spending his life with young scapegraces and constantly subjected to their mockery and pranks, he conceals his cowardice by means of evasiveness and mocking boldness. By habit and calculation he is boastful. Falstaff is not at all stupid – on the contrary. He even has some of the customs of a man who has occasionally seen good society. He has absolutely no principles. He’s as weak as a woman. He needs strong Spanish wine, rich dinners, and money for his mistresses. In order to acquire them he is ready for anything – except manifest danger.

In my youth, chance brought me together with a man in whom nature, it seemed, wishing to imitate Shakespeare, reproduced his great creation. He was a second Falstaff: voluptous, cowardly, boastful, not stupid, amusing, without any principles, tearful, and fat. One circumstance lent him an original charm. He was married. Shakespeare didn’t manage to marry off his bachelor. Falstaff died among his girlfriends, not having managed to be a horned spouse, nor the father of a family — how many scenes lost to the brush of Shakespeare!

Here is a touch from the domestic life of my respectable friend. One day in his absence, his four year old son, the very image of his father and a little Falstaff III, kept repeating to himself, “How bwave Papa is! How the Soveweign woves Papa!” The boy was overheard and they called to him, “Volodya, who told you that?” Volodya answered, “Papa!”

In his poem Shekspir (“Shakespeare, 1924) VN compares Falstaff’s face to an udder with pasted-on moustache:

Надменно-чужд тревоге театральной,

ты отстранил легко и беспечально

в сухой венок свивающийся лавр

и скрыл навек чудовищный свой гений

под маскою, но гул твоих видений

остался нам: венецианский мавр

и скорбь его; лицо Фальстафа - вымя

с наклеенными усиками; Лир

бушующий... Ты здесь, ты жив - но имя,

но облик свой, обманывая мир,

ты потопил в тебе любезной Лете.

Haughty, aloof from theatre’s alarums,
you easily, regretlessly relinquished
the laurels twinning into a dry wreath,
concealing for all time your monstrous genius
beneath a mask; and yet, your phantasm’s echoes
still vibrate for us; your Venetian Moor,
his anguish; Falstaff’s visage, like an udder
with pasted-on mustache; the raging Lear..
You are among us, you’re alive; your name, though,
your image, too – deceiving, thus, the world
you have submerged in your beloved Lethe.

In his poem Zabludivshiysya tramvay (“The Lost Tram,” 1921) Gumilyov mentions an old man who died in Beirut a year ago, Indiya dukha (the India of the spirit) and the executioner with a face like an udder:

И, промелькнув у оконной рамы,

Бросил нам вслед пытливый взгляд

Нищий старик, - конечно, тот самый,

Что умер в Бейруте год назад.

Где я? Так томно и так тревожно

Сердце моё стучит в ответ:

"Видишь вокзал, на котором можно

В Индию Духа купить билет?"

Вывеска... кровью налитые буквы

Гласят: "Зеленная", - знаю, тут

Вместо капусты и вместо брюквы

Мёртвые головы продают.

В красной рубашке с лицом, как вымя,

Голову срезал палач и мне,

Она лежала вместе с другими

Здесь в ящике скользком, на самом дне.

And slipping by the window frame,

A poor old man threw us an inquisitive glance-

The very same old man, of course,

Who had died in Beirut a year ago.

Where am I? So languid and troubled

The beat of my heart responds:

"Do you see the station where you can buy

A ticket to the India of the spirit?"

A sign...Blood-filled letters

Announce: "Zelennaya," - I know that here

Instead of cabbages and rutabagas

The heads of the dead are for sale.

In a red shirt, with a face like an udder,

The executioner cut my head off, too,

It lied together with the others

Here, in a slippery box, at the very bottom.

In Canto Three of his poem Shade describes execution and mentions “empires of rhyme” and “Indies of calculus:”

But who can teach the thoughts we should roll-call
When morning finds us marching to the wall
Under the stage direction of some goon
Political, some uninformed baboon?
We'll think of matters only known to us--
Empires of rhyme, Indies of calculus;
Listen to the distant cocks crow, and discern
Upon the rough gray wall a rare wall fern;
And while our royal hands are being tied,
Taunt our inferiors, cheerfully deride
The dedicated imbeciles, and spit
Into their eyes just for the fun of it. (ll. 597-608)

Gumilyov was executed in August of 1921 (soon after Alexander Blok’s death). At the end of his poem Rasstrel (“The Execution,” 1927) VN mentions the ravine full of cheryomukha (racemosas):

V ovrage (“In the Ravine,” 1899) is a story by Chekhov. According to Kinbote, Shade listed Chekhov among Russian humorists:

Speaking of the Head of the bloated Russian Department, Prof. Pnin, a regular martinet in regard to his underlings (happily, Prof. Botkin, who taught in another department, was not subordinated to that grotesque "perfectionist"): "How odd that Russian intellectuals should lack all sense of humor when they have such marvelous humorists as Gogol, Dostoevski, Chekhov, Zoshchenko, and those joint authors of genius Ilf and Petrov." (note to Line 172)

Shade’s, Kinbote’s and Gradus’ “real” name seems to be Botkin (an American scholar of Russian descent, Professor Vsevolod Botkin went mad and became Shade, Kinbote and Gradus after the tragic death of his daughter Nadezhda). Pnin is the title character of a novel (1957) by VN. His name brings to mind Batyushkov’s poem Na smert’ Pnina (“On Pnin’s Death,” 1805). Batyushkov’s poem Besedka muz (“The Bower of Muses,” 1817) begins: Pod teniyu cheryomukhi mlechnoy… (“In the shade of milky racemosa…”). In his autobiography Speak, Memory (1954) VN speaks of his uncle Ruka (who was, like Kinbote, homosexual) and mentions imeni bezumnogo Batyushkova mlechnaya cheryomukha (the milky racemosa of mad Batyushkov’s fame):

Then, in June again, when the fragrant cheryomuha (racemose old-world bird cherry or simply “racemosa” as I have baptized it in my work on “Onegin”) was in foamy bloom, his private flag would be hoisted on his beautiful Rozhestveno house. He traveled with half-a-dozen enormous trunks, bribed the Nord-Express to make a special stop at our little country station, and with the promise of a marvelous present, on small, mincing feet in high-heeled white shoes would lead me mysteriously to the nearest tree and delicately pluck and proffer a leaf, saying, “Pour mon neveu, la chose la plus belle au monde—une feuille verte.” (Chapter Three, 3)

In his Commentary Kinbote mentions his uncle Conmal, Zemblan translator of Shakespeare, and quotes the first quatrain of Conmal’s sonnet in which slave (cf. slaves who make hay between Shade’s mouth and nose) is mentioned:

English being Conmal's prerogative, his Shakspere remained invulnerable throughout the greater part of his long life. The venerable Duke was famed for the nobility of his work; few dares question its fidelity. Personally, I had never the heart to check it. One callous Academician who did, lost his seat in result and was severely reprimanded by Conmal in an extraordinary sonnet composed directly in colorful, if not quite correct, English, beginning:

I am not slave! Let be my critic slave.
I cannot be. And Shakespeare would not want thus.
Let drawing students copy the acanthus,
I work with Master on the architrave! (note to Line 962)

In Speak, Memory VN says that Uncle Ruka changed his coachman’s name from Pyotr to Lev:

Because he stammered and had difficulty in pronouncing labials, he changed his coachman’s name from Pyotr to Lev; and my father (who was always a little sharp with him) accused him of a slaveowner’s mentality. (Chapter Three, 4)

In the Index to PF Kinbote mentions Count Komarovski, a Russian diplomat who could not pronounce his own name (that comes from komar, “mosquito”):

Marrowsky, a, a rudimentary spoonerism, from the name of a Russian diplomat of the early 19th century, Count Komarovski, famous at foreign courts for mispronouncing his own name--Mararovski, Macaronski, Skomorovski, etc.

In Speak, Memory VN tells about his uncle Konstantin who was in the diplomatic service in London. A brother of VN’s father, Konstantin Nabokov is the author of The Ordeal of a Diplomat (1921) and of an English version of Pushkin’s Boris Godunov. According to VN, uncle Konstantin’s charming little flat was full of souvenirs from India such as photographs of young British officers. (Chapter Three, 1)

Komarovski is a character in Pasternak’s Doctor Zhivago (1957). In his Commentary Kinbote mentions Pasternak’s novel:

A professor of physics now joined in. He was a so-called Pink, who believed in what so-called Pinks believe in (Progressive Education, the Integrity of anyone spying for Russia, Fall-outs occasioned solely by US-made bombs, the existence in the near past of a McCarthy Era, Soviet achievements including Dr. Zhivago, and so forth): "Your regrets are groundless" [said he]. "That sorry ruler is known to have escaped disguised as a nun; but whatever happens, or has happened to him, cannot interest the Zemblan people. History has denounced him, and that is his epitaph."

Shade: "True, sir. In due time history will have denounced everybody. The King may be dead, or he may be as much alive as you and Kinbote, but let us respect facts. I have it from him [pointing to me] that the widely circulated stuff about the nun is a vulgar pro-Extremist fabrication. The Extremists and their friends invented a lot of nonsense to conceal their discomfiture; but the truth is that the King walked out of the palace, and crossed the mountains, and left the country, not in the black garb of a pale spinster but dressed as an athlete in scarlet wool."

"Strange, strange," said the German visitor, who by some quirk of alderwood ancestry had been alone to catch the eerie note that had throbbed by and was gone. (note to Line 894)

Kinbote’s note to Line 937 (in which old Zembla’s fields are mentioned) ends in the words “strange, strange.”

On the other hand, “Indies of calculus” in Shade’s poem bring to mind a certain Hindu calculator mentioned by VN in another chapter of SM:

A foolish tutor had explained logarithms to me much too early, and I had read (in a British publication, the Boy’s Own Paper, I believe) about a certain Hindu calculator who in exactly two seconds could find the seventeenth root of, say, 3529471145760275132301897342055866171392 (I am not sure I have got this right; anyway the root was 212). (Chapter Two, 2)